One of the problems with employers is they have a habit of not recognising boundaries.
The boss of a brokerage firm has been slammed for offering his employees an extra bonus – if they lose weight.
Nithin Kamath, CEO of Zerodha, tweeted about the “fun health programme” he was running with staff which tracked their Body Mass Index (BMI).
I’m not the only one who sees that this is wrong in so may ways. Not just because it gives anorexics a green light, but because this crosses the boundary that exists between the personal and the professional. Okay, some professions do require an essential level of fitness – firefighters, for example – but that’s a condition of employment. For normal workplaces, however, no, none of his business.
Mr Kamath, who is based in Bangalore, India, said those on his team with a BMI over 25 would receive a bonus of half their monthly salary.
But he added if staff members could get their BMI down to around the 24 mark, they would receive double the amount as a bonus.
Mr Kamath explained: “The lowest average BMI or the largest change in average BMI wins. The winner chooses a charity everyone else contributes to.”
It gets worse – now we have compulsory giving. I decide what charities I give to, not some employer. Just as well I’m not employed. But, then, I knew that self-employment was best for me a long time ago. The more I see stories like this, the more that is confirmed. If I was employed by this joker, I’d do what I did back in my Railtrack days when a similar compulsory giving stunt was floated. I flatly refused to play and pretty soon the whole thing fell apart as others started to think rather than just give in and pay up.
“Why should my pay or a bonus be linked to my body type? The only thing relevant is my work.”
Yup. The relationship between employer and employee is an exchange of time, labour and expertise for money. That’s it. Nothing else. When I was employed, I studiously avoided anything that strayed outside of this boundary.
Responding to criticism online, Mr Kamath said: “We have experimented with a bunch of ideas since Covid and [working from home] to help the team think about their health.
“Sitting is the new smoking, & the idea has been to nudge everyone to move.”
Ah, yeah, nudge. That is downright evil. It is not the business of an employer to nudge anyone anywhere. The relationship is strictly confined to work related matters and nothing else. Although I suppose given the popularity of this vile psychological abuse with governments, other idiots would latch onto it sooner or later.
“So as a company, the onus is to do whatever to nudge everyone on the team to think about their health.”
No, it isn’t. And, no, it is not ‘fun.’
I agree that this crosses the line, both the encouragement to lose weight, which as you say will do no favours for any of the staff who might be vulnerable to certain eating disorders and the compulsory giving.
I see no occupational requirement for this boss to make these demands and it is disrespecting the boundaries of the employer/employee relationship. This BMI stunt is nothing like a genuine requirement for the job. It’s not the same as a requirement for a Hep jab for a medic or as you say a firefighter’s fitness test or even a pilot’s medical. It has no relation to the job in question one bit. This boss is drunk on power and we’ve seen lots of these types recently.
As for the compulsory giving I hate that as well. I’ve no time at all for Comic Relief or BBC Children in Need as I don’t believe the money that these charities receive is all spent on stuff that is either needed or which I approve of yet my kid’s school makes Comic Relief and CIN almost compulsory. It appears to be a similar thing to what you said about the compulsory giving idea on the railways.
As for ‘nudge’. It is a tactic that can both used for good but equally for bad, the problem as I see it is who is deciding what is good and what is bad? The very nature of these techniques and tactics is that the sort of people who are most likely to want to deploy them might not be the sort of people who are working in our best interests as both individuals and families. All I can say that I’m bloody thankful that nudge techniques and the media means to deploy then were not available to the Uni-Testicled Austrian Corporal and his chums. Imagine what he or Stalin or Mao or a host of other shitheels would have done with such power?
I flatly refused to play and pretty soon the whole thing fell apart as others started to think rather than just give in and pay up
Well done LR, I’d have done same
I have a work life and a private life, rarely do I allow the two to mingle
Worst time of year: work Christmas parties – I usually conjure up an excuse
@FH211
+1
I seem to recall attending a retirement do once. But otherwise, I had a wall with a moat full of alligators and machine gun turrets between my personal life and my professional one.
The science doesn’t support the idea that a BMI of 24 is healthier than a BMI of 26:
Conclusions and Relevance Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1555137
Katherine Flegal paid a price for going against the established public health narrative:
At first, I was startled, but eventually I came to expect partisan attacks masquerading as scientific concerns. I had expected some modest interest in our findings, pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. I had not expected an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, social media posts and even complaints to my employer – many more instances than I have space to describe here. It seemed that some felt that our work should be judged not on its merits but rather on whether its findings supported the goals and objectives of the interlocutors. I saw first-hand the antagonism that can be provoked by inconvenient scientific findings.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062021000670
The article doesn’t really read as though any of this is compulsory. It’s a stupid idea, but the company I work for come out with a long line of constant stupid ideas to get ‘the team’ involved and most of us just ignore every one
The latest is walking on some hill and I doubt there will be enough people turning up to even go ahead
There will be a lot of ‘outrage’ at this one because you’re not allowed to criticise fat people any more, as they may have some kind of eating disorder, real or made up, but the truth is, most fat people are just fat
An employees weight is nothing to do with the employer as long as it doesn’t affect job performance, but this incentive is really no different to all the other nonsense about smoking, mental health, eating etc, that countless companies up and down the country are coming out with all the time
It’s just something to be ignored, unless it’s your thing, then go nuts. For some people, work is the only social life they get
Doesn’t really matter. It is out of bounds. Personal medical information is just that, personal and none of the employer’s business even in fun and even if it is voluntary.
That is one way of dealing with it. Mine is to simply say ‘no.’
And they are wrong as well and for the same reason – their business remit is confined to work performance and nothing else. The problem with these ‘voluntary’ and ‘fun’ schemes is that they place pressure on employees to go along with it and people do because they feel pressured. It takes a degree of bloody mindedness to tell them where to get off and why.
Fair point. Doesn’t make it okay for the employer to cross the line though.
I had an interesting interaction with a fairly chubby girl that I was sharing a lane with at the swimming pool. She was preparing to do some sprinting so I politely asked if I could join in. For me a 50 metre sprint involves fifty seconds of vigorous swimming followed by a minute of heavy breathing. Not this girl, her version involved forty seconds of swimming and twenty seconds of recovery time before setting off again. So I ended up doing three sets in the time that she did five. I managed to get somewhere near her on the last set but still lost. She was a lot younger than me so that’s one thing in my favour. How many people are going to look at her, see that she’s a bit fat and think she’s not fit?
I agree that this company is out of order poking its nose into employees personal affairs. The only tiny bit of mitigation is that they are offering a bonus rather than penalising people but it’s still wrong. Using the discredited BMI scale is also bad. I have to keep an eye on my weight because I’m a diabetic and have slight problems with blood pressure but that is up to me and nobody else’s business. My BMI is a little under 24, my build is muscular but very lean. If I put on a stone I would be classed as overweight which is clearly ridiculous. It is by setting the bar for being overweight or obese so absurdly low that we are being told that we have a problem when, in reality, we have nothing of the sort.
Problem is how BMI is seen as the only indiator of what matters – same as Covid tests mean ‘you are sick’
Observation should be the first measure, then BMI an aid to diagnosis. Many super-fit are BMI fat due to muscle mass/density which is >20% higher than fat eg rowers, prof rugby… F1 drivers would be too, but they’re usually short
“It takes a degree of bloody mindedness to tell them where to get off and why.”
I must be bloody minded too then. The team building nonsense was just starting to happen at my workplace in the couple of years before I retired. I suppose that being on the home straight made me feel as though I could speak my mind freely. There were some rather frank discussions over the email about it.
I’ve always been bloody minded. Any attempt by an employer to cross that boundary was immediately and firmly rebuffed.